The only way you can lose heat in space is through radiation. But radiation carries momentum. Not much per photon, but it was enough to cause the Pioneer probes to move in unexpected ways. This means you have to emit equal amounts of heat towards Earth and towards space. If your resultant is zero, then you're fine. You can even direct some of the heat backwards. It won't do a huge amount, but every bit of atmospheric drag you overcome, the less fuel you need to use to stay in orbit.

So you basically need absolutely gigantic radiators behind the space-based data centre, located inside a parabolic dish that will generate drag of its own (not to mention a potential difference betwen the lower and upper sections).

This is an insane level of complexity. You're better off parking it in a stable orbit between the Earth and the moon, so it's absolutely clear of atmospheric effects. You're still going to need radiators, but it's marginally better as you don't have to do quite so much directing of it. The latency would be horrible, maintenance would be next to impossible, and there's all kinds of other issues to consider.

No, I don't think you can make this workable.

However, space might be useful. This very same issue of heat only being radiated means that you can make wafers with much more even loss of temperature, no dust, bacteria, or dirt, and much lower gravity. If you were to make extremely high quality wafers (silicon or gallium arsonide) in space, then you should be able to make WSI processors, which should in turn reduce the demands that datacentres make.

The time it would take to set all this up would be about the same time as it took for IBM to perfect its stacked transistor topology. Intel was talking 90 cores per wafer-scale CPU a few years back - the shrinkage in transistors since then plus the x10 density IBM proposes might push you to 1800 cores per wafer, provided you can get the quality high enough. Which, in space, is quite possible.

You wouldn't need your datacentres in space. Your wafer-scale CPU plus packaging would be about the same size as a CD drive. You could pretty much dispense with datacentres at that point. A typical tower will have two spare bays. "Cartridge datacentres" could simply be plugged in as needed. A regular CPU-based cartridge for heavy general-purpose computing, a GPU-based cartridge for LLMs. Yes, home users would have power usage through the roof, but then it's no longer your problem.

Thing is, PC gaming has been diskless for ages. The last game I bought on disk was in 2015 and that was because I lived in Australia and internet speeds were shit back then.

PC gaming has never really been cheaper, even with the ridiculous price of RAM and SSDs at the moment. A gaming PC I built 5 years ago is still more powerful than a PS pro (to start with, it's a Zen 3 CPU, the PS pro is still Zen 2).

PC gaming is cheaper than console gaming if you actually play games. Consoles are a false economy, the initial hardware is sold at a loss to get you in the door then they pile on charge after charge after charge, pay for access to online services, pay more for games, so on and so forth. PC gaming is the opposite, higher cost of entry as no-one is subsidising the hardware but no-one is expecting to make that back in additional fees and charges afterwards so once you've paid the inital cost for the hardware, savings start immediately. Games are cheaper and go on sale more often and Steam, GoG, et al. could triple their access fee tomorrow and no one would care because 3 x $0 is still $0.

People are realising the console price is a false economy and it's not helping (or is helping, depending on if you're a console fanboy or not) that a PS pro is only £80 more than a PS pro. Because people are looking to reduce their ongoing spend with consoles, Sony and MS are having to raise hardware prices. This, to digital only is one way Sony is trying to shore that up, by making sure that they get a cut of every single sale. Also the breaking of backwards compatibility is a feature, not a bug, as that means all your older games need to be re-purchased through the rip off store.

Which brings me to another point... I've 30+ year old games that still work on my current gaming PC. Of course I've got the installers on a hard drive now as no-one's seen a floppy drive in years and the original disks have probably melted in my sisters garage back in Oz. Games older than the original playstation.

Yet console fanboys keep lining up for more. Doesn't matter how much abuse they get, the only response is "yes master, may I have some more".

The Concorde's engines were adapted from military engines, the Rolls Royce Olympus which powered the Avro Vulcan bomber, so yeah, they were F-ing loud.

Question is, can we develop quieter engines these days? Modern high bypass turbofans (like the RR Trent) are way quieter than their older counterparts. Especially the older low bypass turbofans (I.E. on the 727s)

> No reason why actual antibiotics requires long and careful testing to make sure they are reasonably safe. We can do away with all that now!

Some of the more modern antibiotics can melt your liver or cause you to rip your tendons.

You definitely want these things to be thoroughly tested.

Nixon started the cancer moon shot 50 years ago and during that time we have learned that cancer is not 40 diseases. It's 400.

All my Rokus are now infested with ads but the Roku stick is even worse since it seems to take an absurd amount of time for it to just connect to the wifi.

(my real Rokus are all hard wired)

I'm sure they all get subjected to the same annual corporate ethics training courses. Some policies apply company wide even in megacorps that employ 300,000 people.

The gun nuts are the ones supporting the secret police.

Whilst you're 100% correct that gun nuts are melts living in a fantasy world who would piss themselves if anyone broke into their house rather than carrying out their heroic gun fantasies, I think the GPP was referring to a breakdown in society where people get territorial and violent. Society is, as they say only three meals away from anarchy. In anarchy all bets are off.

Erm... the US is becoming a Soviet state?

Well you are aligned with Russia now.

For the uninitiated, and the reason no-one actually uses "second world" any more is because it originally meant what side of the cold war you were on. The planet was divided into three separate "worlds", the first world being US, NATO and allies, the second world being the Soviet Union and countries aligned with them, the third world was unaligned countries. As time went on and the fact most developed countries were aligned with NATO and most unaligned countries were developing or undeveloped it became shorthand for rich and poor countries and with the collapse of the Soviet Union the second world ceased to exist.

So technically speaking, the Philippines is a first world country whilst Switzerland is a third world country (the former being staunch US allies and the second being staunchly neutral).

I'm no grammar NAZI so you can use first and third world to refer to economic development but "second" world is categorically wrong as it never developed a new meaning, it ceased to exist 30 years ago. If you would like to differentiate between poor and dirt poor countries economically, might I suggest using the terms "developing" and "undeveloped" respectively as that's what you'd put on a report you'd make to someone like the UN security council.

All spelling and grammatical errors contained in this post are intentional, grammar nazis need entertainment.

You misspelled "privacy".

This just "virtue signalling" for those with absolutely no virtues. Equal and opposite, instead of standing up for good causes they're letting everyone know they only support bad ones, I guess we can call it vice signalling but that still sounds too kind as most people with vices are generally still nice and well rounded, sin signalling then... Being British and Australian I'm going with "cunt signalling" as that's what they're trying to tell us they are and who they're trying to appeal to, however that's not really a BBC Two word.

Better than a dyslexic genie. No one wants a 12 inch pianist.

Never sounded so good.

The transistors aren't actually smaller. They fit more of them in the same 2 dimensional area by using layers. The layers are the Z dimension. The thermals are an interesting question.